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To Criticize and Repudiate Revisionism,
It is Essential to Combat Self-Interest

OUR great leader Chairman Mao’s latest instruction to
“combat self-interest, criticize and repudiate revisionism” summarizes on the highest
plane the basic content of the great proletarian cultural revolution; it is a great programme
for making revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Combatting self-interest and criticizing and repudiating
revisionism are two interrelated matters. In order to criticize and repudiate revisionism, it
is essential to combat self-interest. Only when we have successfully eliminated self-interest,
shall we be able to carry the struggle against revisionism through to the end more
effectively.

Combating self-interest means struggling against self-interest
as manifested in the concept of private ownership, self-interest as manifested in selfishness.
The concepts of private ownership and selfishness grow out of the economic base of the system
of private ownership and they in turn serve this same economic base. They are the ideological
source for the emergence and development of revisionism.

In our country, the economic base has been changed and the
socialist system of public ownership has replaced the system of private ownership. But the
concept of private ownership, which is part of the old superstructure, will not vanish of
itself; it will continue to survive for a long time. It is having a corrosive and destructive
effect on the new, socialist economic base. Our socialist economic base cannot be consolidated
and developed and the danger of a capitalist restoration will continue to exist unless we
tirelessly sweep away the concept of private ownership.

The handful of Party persons in authority taking the
capitalist road and all the ghosts and monsters in society desperately protect the system and
concept of private ownership. All of the old things that the great proletarian cultural
revolution aims to abolish, whether they be old systems, old ideas, old culture, old customs
and habits, can be summed up in one wordó“self-interest.”

The great proletarian cultural revolution advances in the
fierce struggle against our class enemies and in the process of eliminating self-interest and
promoting devotion to the public interest within our own ranks.

Chairman Mao teaches us: “We must be good at guiding
those people in our ranks with petty bourgeois ideas on to the path of the proletarian
revolution. This is crucial to the success of the great proletarian cultural revolution.”

This means that we must make vigorous efforts to eliminate
self-interest and promote devotion to the public interest. The practice of the great proletarian
cultural revolution over more than a year fully testifies to the fact that wherever there has
been success in combating self-interest, revisionism has been thoroughly criticized and
repudiated, the great proletarian cultural revolution has advanced smoothly and great
achievements have been made.

When self-interest is one’s first consideration, it is
impossible to criticize and repudiate revisionism seriously. If self-interest is not
eradicated, it will be impossible to finish off revisionism.

If, in repudiating revisionism, self-interest comes in, it
is not only impossible to refute revisionism, but the possibility arises that one will himself
slip down the revisionist path.

Both self-interest and revisionism are egoism; they are both
common to the bourgeois world outlook. It is inconceivable that one could repudiate revisionism
and be able to refute it in a thoroughgoing manner from the platform of self-interest.

The main target of the great proletarian cultural revolution
is a handful of Party persons in authority taking the capitalist road. At the same time, the
cultural revolution aims to solve the question of the people’s world outlook, to eliminate
bourgeois ideology and to dig out the roots of revisionism. This is a thoroughgoing revolution
in world outlook, a revolution which remoulds people’s very souls, a great revolution to
eliminate self-interest and foster devotion to the public interest.

In this great and unprecedented revolution, every proletarian
revolutionary should regard himself as an integral part of the revolutionary force and, at the
same time, as a target of the revolution. He should use Marxism-Leninism, Mao Tse-tung’s
thought, to combat self-interest in his own mind and remould his world outlook thoroughly.

Only by replacing self-interest by devotion to the public
interest and replacing the bourgeois world outlook by the proletarian world outlook is it
possible to hold high the great red banner of Mao Tse-tung’s thought and to stand firm on the
side of Chairman Mao’s proletarian revolutionary line. Only in this way is it possible to put
the proletarian Party spirit and the people’s interests above everything else, to follow
Chairman Mao’s great strategic plan closely, to hold firmly to the general orientation for the
revolutionary struggle, to consolidate and develop revolutionary alliances and revolutionary
“three-in-one” combinations, to concentrate fire on the target and to overthrow, completely
discredit and thoroughly and penetratingly repudiate the handful of Party persons in authority
taking the capitalist road headed by China’s Khrushchov, and victoriously accomplish the tasks
of struggle-criticism-transformation in each unit.